Natalija goes to ClickZ Hong Kong

“Even if you are in a so-called ‘low interest’ category (toothpaste or toilet paper), you cannot adopt a ‘wait and see’ approach and let digital take its course by itself. Your brand is already online as people are talking, sharing their stories and perhaps complaining about you – do not leave it to chance.”

With a 15-year history – 5 years in Hong Kong – ClickZ prides itself as being the leading conference for digital marketers. Sounds cool? Challenge accepted. On the 5th of August, I, Natalija, growth hacker at Piktochart, headed to Hong Kong to check it out. The two days held much promise. I was looking forward to the talks, endless networking with high-profile marketers, digital trend discussions and strategies on the business scene in Hong Kong and Asia in general.

Setting the tone

The conference started with a keynote speech by Jason Oke, Regional Managing Director of Red Fuse Communications titled “Silence is not an option”.

This strong premise was followed by a helpful how-to list. Here are my highlights:

Connect the dots internally. Your marketing strategy with business objectives for example. If you are a mess internally, your marketing activities will also be disconnected externally resulting in unfruitful marketing activities,

Spend time on non-sexy items. A shiny video might sound cool but a thorough UX examination would be much more effective,

Don’t try to do everything alone. Foster partnerships,

Usefulness > Thoroughness; a self filmed how-to video is more beneficial to the community than a perrfectly filmed high budgeted which doesn’t bring much value

And lastly: Share your failures, not just successes; so that others can learn

Multi Tracked

Recognizing the multi-faceted nature of marketing field, ClickZ went through great lengths to cater to as many specializations as possible. Across two days, we were presented with 6(!) different tracks. Here are some of my notes:

Social media crisis management

Rudi Leung, General Manager of [email protected] HK, presented the case study of IKEA and its toy Lufsig. From the moment the crisis escalated to its peak (an attack on Chief Executive of Hong Kong C.Y. Leung) and receded – and the actions taken behind the scene. What’s the secret to crisis management in social media? Be agile and responsive, transparent, and human. Most importantly, listen to what is being said! It is not about you anymore, it is about the other person, so your press release won’t do much good.

Going Mobile

Michael Wolcyzk talked about THE trend in marketing – Mobile. He had a rather intuitive thought which is often forgotten by marketers and UX designers. He said it is important to not only design a responsive website but also to adapt to user experience. Something that works on desktop like long registration forms can be a deal breaker on mobile. Simple enough? You bet. Put on the user hat and do a serious user experience revision – with rather small improvements you will be counting extra signups in no time!

Roundtables

Besides regular presentations and networking breaks ClickZ organizers added expert roundtables that aimed to bring open discussion into the conference and offered the attendees the opportunity to utilize the expert as a resource of knowledge.

During the session I received a ton of questions; about Piktochart, about content marketing and “going viral”. we talked about different types of visual content and their pros & cons (video vs. vine vs. gifs, infographics vs. presentation) among other specific issues at hand.

Selfies

For a bit of fun, Acronym organized a selfie contest. The rules were simple: take a pair of Acronym shades, snap a selfie and tag them in a tweet. Winning shots get a bottle of Moët & Chandon champagne.

To be honest, I was not planning to participate (heh yes, you can call me lazy contest-messages-deaf generation-whatever person) but I bumped into Rohanak Naidu, a cool AIESECer working in InvestHK. And we ended up taking a wefie (Hello internet!).